To the Victors
by Sullen Siren
Summary: In the aftershocks of a won war, the survivors take stock of what they've become.  (Updated with new chapter!)
1. To the Victors

To The Victors

"Life must go on 

And the dead be forgotten; 

Life must go on 

Though good men die. 

Anne, eat your breakfast; 

Dan, take your medicine. 

Life must go on; 

I forget just why." 

--  Edna St. Vincent Millay

He called me yesterday over a scratchy phone line while traffic and city life hummed in the background.  He called me in the middle of the night, and I could hear it in his voice; he was broken.  Monosyllabic and monotone, but I knew the shades of his voice, knew the resonance of his words and the shape of the things he left unsaid.  I had heard him more than he would ever guess, watched him pass through dreams and nightmares, his voice distant and cold or warm and relevant.  Always, I knew it, recognized it from a single sigh.  I could tell from a word what he was feeling.  Hundreds of miles away, over a static filled connection while the ceiling fan rattled in its circular path, always just barely keeping from plummeting, still I could tell.  He was broken.  Cold and lifeless, neither hope nor anger in his voice, just an empty blankness.  

It didn't shock me, but then so little does, nowadays.  What surprised me was me.  I didn't care.  Hundreds of miles away the love of my life was dead inside, and I couldn't find even a small part of myself that cared anymore.  

Isn't it strange how we only see how much we've changed when we look at someone else?  I don't even know who I am anymore.  But that doesn't bother me.  The only thing that upsets me even a little bit is knowing how much I should be bothered, but aren't.

I suppose I'm broken too.  I wonder if somewhere, someone heard it in me over a long distance call.  It seems unlikely though.  And it would be better if they hadn't.  The casualties were high enough, weren't they?  Broken, battered dolls piled high against castle walls – cannon fodder shot down in the blossom of our youth.  I wasn't young, and neither was he.  And maybe he had started out broken.  We'd mended him together, held him together with strings and love for a while.  But it hadn't held.  I wasn't broken to start with.  I know that much, at least.  

Some mornings, I don't even recognize myself in the mirror.  Most mornings, I just don't look.  I hate thinking these things.  I've spent so much energy pushing this side of myself behind a wall.  This morning, I don't have the energy to even try.

Waffles.  I'd always hated them, but never got up the courage to say so.  It was the only thing he could cook, and he did it every week, plopping them in front of us and sinking into a chair as if this – his only contribution to household chores – was the most difficult thing he'd ever done.  It was Belgian this morning, with a faint hint of cinnamon and almond extract.  The smell lingers in my nostrils and even the smallest bite sticks in my throat.  Normally, he'd barely notice the way I picked at them.  Today, he notices.  I know better than to think that has anything to do with me.

Cool gray eyes.  "Not hungry?"

I shake my head.  "No.  Not really."

A long, awkward pause.  Red heads bend forcefully over sticky, syrup laden plates as they try to ignore the conversation they feel coming.  "Phone rang late last night."

"I heard it."

A frown, tiny wrinkles appearing at the corners of pale lips.  "You answered it?"  Malfoy never mentioned the phone, the fax, the TV.  Our small house sits on a strange sort of unseen border between the wizard world and the muggle one, and Draco's room had no electricity.  It had when we moved in, but he firmly refused to live there unless it was removed or hidden.  Accoutrements of muggle life were beneath his notice.  That sentence alone tells me how much he cares

I sigh.  I do that a lot.  It never fails to irritate him.  He scowls and I nod silently.  He waits, one fair eyebrow lifted in wordless question.  "He's in London.  He just got back."

One of the red heads jerk up, eyes going wide.  Ron asks what Draco won't.  "Is he alright?  How did he sound?  Where has he been?"

I shrug.  "He didn't say where he'd been.  He was fine though."  I try not to meet the gray eyes, but at times like these, Draco can capture a gaze and hold it until he chooses to let go.  He reads the truth in my eyes.  He's good at that, the bastard.  Someone as callus as he is shouldn't be able to read people so well.  But then, he's not exactly callus anymore, and I'm not exactly sensitive.  Time changes everything.  

Or almost everything.  I wince as Ron stands up, a smile on his face.  "We should go get him.  Where in London?  Is he back at that hole of a flat he rented in June?  There's never anyone there, we could apperate in."

 I can feel the gray eyes watching me, the twin brown gazes making a point of looking away as Ron frowned.  "Hermione?"  

"He didn't say."

"What do you mean he didn't say?  Didn't you ask?"

I wish I was anywhere but here.  "No."

"Why?"

A slow, drawling voice.  The voice that taunted me second year, the one he used so much more sparingly now that he was older.  That voice alone gave away his fury.  "Because Granger doesn't give a damn where the famous Harry Potter has gone to sulk this time."

"He's not sulking."  It's an automatic defense, and he knows it; mouth quirking up in a disdainful half smile at the half-hearted reply.  I ignore him.  "He knows where we are Ron.  He could come home if he wanted to."

Ron snorted.  "Bloody hell he could.  Harry doesn't know what he wants.  He's . . . "He purses his lips in thought, searching for a word.

"Empty."  They all looked at me, and I regret the word.  But once begun, I can't seem to stop.  "Ron, you HAVE to see that.  He's gone.  He left after the war.  And I don't just mean his constant trips to nowhere.  I'm talking about . . . Harry.  Every time we see him, there's less there to be seen.  Something has been breaking away from him bit by bit for years.  And now it's gone.  I could hear it.  Last night . . . it was like talking to a shadow.  Worthless and . . . empty.  Go and get him.  Bring him back.  It won't do any good."  My arms wrap around my chest, trying to hold in warmth I hadn't felt for months.  I can't remember, at that moment, what it felt like to not be tired. "Sometimes, I don't think Harry was ever supposed to survive the war."  I hear the soft gasp, but don't look.

Strong hands close around my shoulders.  I expect Ron, but my opened eyes find Draco instead.  He is heavier than he had been in childhood, his face less feminine, not so narrow.  But the hands around my shoulders are still soft, manicured - the hands of a boy who'd never known what it was to want for anything.  "I'd say it was the pot calling the kettle black, Granger.  But I think you already know that."  

He sinks into a chair across from mine.  He still moves like a Malfoy, most of the time.  When he went rough, graceless, and boneless it was worrying.  Or it would be, if I worried about him.  Those immaculate hands tap a pattern against the scarred arms of the wooden chair.  It is a long moment before I let myself look at him, and the fingers tap ever faster, never losing their rhythm.  I want to stab them with a fork.  When I do look up, I don't bother to hide the loathing.  It surprises him, I can see that.  And Malfoy isn't easily surprised.  "Fuck you, Malfoy."  

A slow drawl, but half hearted, uncertain.  "Not right now, Granger.  Ask later, when you're not looking so . . ." He trails off, shrugging delicately, letting the distaste in his expression barb the insult more cruelly than words would have.  He'd learned that since we were children – then he hadn't understood that there were things that wounded worse than words.  There is worry in his eyes, and longing.  I hate that.  I hate that, of all of us, he was the one who hadn't turned cold and unfeeling.  I hate how the distance in him is an act, but the distance in me is a state of being.  "What did he say?"

"He said hello.  He said goodbye.  He said that he almost died of food poisoning in Germany, and that he's not going to go to America because he's afraid he'll wind up in California, and that much sun might kill him.  He said to say hello to everyone, and that he'd be home soon."  I look at him, and revel in the hope in his expression because I know I can crush it.  "He lied.  He's not coming home.  He's never coming home.  He's going to be no one and nothing until he finally just fades away."

Pale lips tighten, the near constant smirk fading.  I feel my own mouth curling in a mockery of his expression.  I let it.  "You can't know that."

"Eight years.  Eight years I've known him.  I've nursed him through death, through pain, through injury.  I watched him while people fell away from him and died.  I helped him step over the bodies and move on.  I saw what it did to him, and I kept him going."  I glance at Ron, see the horror in his eyes and I want to feel guilty.  But I don't.  "Ron and I watched it.  Ask him.  He remembers.  Once, seventh year after Dumbledore died, Ron wanted to let him rest.  He hurt for him.  I couldn't.  Ron was his heart – I was his drive.  So I drove.  I pushed him on, and he went on.  But I knew what I was doing.  I knew what the price would be.  Even then, I knew."  I shake my head, old voices speaking inside my mind.  "I **can** know that, Draco."

Silver head bows, and there is a certain triumph in that too.  It suddenly occurs to me that had I met myself when I was eleven – or even fifteen – I would have hated myself.  What's more, I would be justified.  "He could come back."  He sounds like a child, standing in shocked tearlessness beside the grave of his first dog. 

"He won't."  I pause, and the gray eyes look up to meet mine.  I drive a knife deep into them.  "And even if he did, it would never be for you."

He looks away.  "It wouldn't be for you, either."

I shrug.  "I know."  I did.  I'd known that for years.  I'd come to terms with it in a narrow bed draped in scarlet and gold, where the walls smelled of mildew and fireplace smoke.  I'd accepted it when green eyes grew more and more distant and even the nights spent together felt like they were alone.  

He stares down at his hands, and I sit back in my chair, pushing the waffles away.  He is a puppet with cut strings dangling lifeless and morose.  I think that if I looked in his eyes, they'd be empty.  I'd have carved away all those things I did not want to see anymore.  I want to regret that, but I can't.  I watch instead, the silence stretching long and thin and fragile between us.  A word breaks it.  "Hermione . . ."  

I look over.  God, I hadn't thought I could still feel pain like that.  Sharp and brittle and dull all at once.  It fades too fast, gone so quickly I wonder if maybe it was just a stray memory.  His freckles stand out in sharp relief against his pale skin, shock of red hair seeming to turn gray all at once in the morning sunlight.  He shakes his head slowly.  "I didn't understand.  I didn't . . . . I didn't see."  He looks like his father had when he'd held a broken body he'd loved in his arms.  "This is all so wrong."

"Ron I didn't– I mean I wasn't–" But that is a lie too.  In some way, on some level, I'd wanted to hurt him too.  Because he still had hope, because he believes.  Because he'd held onto the things I lost.  "I'm just . . ."

"Don't."  He is angry now.  "Don't patronize me!  Don't take it back.  You meant it.  You meant everything.  And all along, I've been too stupid to see.  Poor, slow Ron, waiting for his best friend to come back home.  God knows I wanted him to – I needed a friend.  I haven't had that since he left, you know that?  It used to be the three of us, Hermione, now it's just me.  Who the hell are you now?  Is there anything left that you care about?  Is there anything left of the girl I lo – knew?"  His temper surfaces so rarely these days.  The red stain on his face, the white-gripped knuckles, the clenched jaw; they were almost unfamiliar.  I watch him for a moment, seeing ghosts of the children we'd been beside him and in him.  "Well?  Are you even going to bloody answer me?"

I shake my head.  "I don't know."

"What?  You don't know what, Hermione?"

"I don't know anything."

Draco's voice, brittle as porcelain.  "Isn't that a switch.  Not the brainy mudblood with her hand in the air anymore, eh Granger?"

I almost don't see it, it happens so fast.  A blur of red and silver and flashing fists, and then Draco glares malevolently up from the floor, blood running down his face like a muddy stream.  Ron stands still again.  His hands are still fisted, blood smeared across one of them.  He stares down at Draco, who just lies there, sprawled and watching.  "I-" He shakes his head, too-long red locks flying.  "I didn't-" He stops, fists slowly unclenching.  "I'm sorry."  

He turns on his heel and leaves, after a moment one of the red heads rises to follow him, her long hair hiding her face as she leaves.  I watch her for a long moment and then turn to see Draco push himself slowly from the floor, grace turned into the creaking-boned movements of an old man.  He sits back down and stares at his plate.  When I speak, I can see that it startles him.  "Do you remember seventh year, during the attack on the Burrow?"

A soft sound from the only red head that remains at the table, but I ignore it.  Draco looks at me, blood still drifting down his face.  "Not likely to forget it, Granger."

"You were with us.  In a way, I was almost angry at you for coming over to the Order – did you know that?"  

"I was neither blind, nor stupid.  I leave that to you Gryffindors.  You've perfected the arts, after all."  

I ignore his barbs.  "There's a list outside the ministry – I pass it everyday.  Death eaters still wanted for that attack, and for the last attack on Hogwarts.  I read the names, everyday."  I look at him.  "I left to find Remus."  

"What are you BABBLING about, Granger?"

"She was out back, sneaking in.  She wasn't herself – I could see it.  Imperious, probably.  Just this blank look in her eyes.  I remembered that you had changed, and then I thought of the battle behind me.  I thought of Harry, and I knew what he would do – what Remus would do.  They're good, you see.  Remus always gives people so many chances – even you, you know.  It was he who convinced us to give you a chance when you came over.  Told us there was more to you than we'd ever seen.  Harry agreed.  After all you'd done, after the monster you'd been he still agreed.  I always thought it unlikely you were as foolish and shallow as you seemed, but I didn't think you could be good underneath it.  I didn't want to.  You were such an arse after all.  You still are."

"Why thank you.  I didn't-"

I go on, my words drowning him out and forcing him into silence.  "I thought about what they'd do.   Tie her up, jinx her, talk to her when it was over and quiet and she could lie to them.  If they were lucky.  If she didn't get loose.  And then I thought about what Voldemort might have set her up to do, what he might see through her eyes.  Maybe he thought you'd help her.  Maybe he knew Harry wouldn't kill her.  Maybe I was just wrong.  I'd learned it sixth year – from a book in the Restricted Section that I don't think anyone else had read in centuries.  It had fallen behind a shelf and gotten wedged.  The dust on it was so thick I couldn't read the title, but I dropped my quill and bent to get it, and found the book.  And I've always just done what needed to be done.  I protected him – them.  I always had.  They broke rules and snuck out after hours – I broke laws and lives to help them.  I still don't know if they understand that."

There is an odd look in his eyes, a reluctant understanding.  "Hermione."

"Her name is still on the list.  I killed her, and her name is still on the list.  And every night I go to sleep, and I wait for the part where I have nightmares about it.  I wait for the part where I'm sorry for it.  I wait for a time when I see Pansy Parkinson's face and I have some kind of guilt for what I did.  But I don't.  Because it was war.  Because I'm not a hero, and I'm not good, and I'm not anything but clever.  And sometimes, I wonder what would have happened if I'd been sorted into Ravenclaw, or Slytherin.  I wonder what would have happened if I hadn't met Harry, and hadn't been pulled into something that was so big, and so difficult that it sucked the life out of me."  

His eyes aren't empty.  I think they are teary, but maybe I'm wrong.  Mine are dry.  It is an old story to me, after all.  "When I came back, Fred was dead.  I wondered if maybe that was because I'd killed Pansy.  I wondered, and I didn't really care.  Because it was war, and I'd done what I had to.  I'd done what they couldn't.  And now there's nothing left that has to be done.  There's no cause, no reason.  There's just emptiness and grief, and I'm just the girl who killed someone and doesn't care."  

I sigh, and the air in my lungs feels cold and heavy.  "And last night, The Boy Who Lived called me from a phone somewhere in London, and listening to him was like listening to myself.  The Dark Lord is dead, but there will be another one tomorrow, next year, two centuries from now – and Harry Potter is just another ghost in the rooms he's in.  He survived, but he didn't.  And most of all, I wonder what would have happened if I had just let him kill her.  I could have made him do it.  I was good at it.  In the end days, there weren't many things I couldn't convince Harry to do.  All his energy went to fighting the other side; he didn't have any left to fight me.  He's gone anyway – I didn't save him by losing myself.  So if I hadn't done it, would I be different?  Would that phone call have broken my heart?  Would I feel bad for not eating your fucking waffles, and for crawling into a different bed a few times a month, just to try to feel like I'm not a ghost in my own skin?"  

"What do you want from me, Granger?"

It's an odd question, really.  "Nothing."

"Then why tell me?"

I shrug my shoulders helplessly.  "Because you're here.  Because I don't mind if you bleed.  Because I don't care what you think of me.  Because sometimes it's your bed I crawl into, and I thought you might like to know.  Because she was in your house.  Because I don't like your waffles."

"Because you're leaving."

I feel a wry smile – an echo of his – tug at a corner of my mouth.  "That too."

"My waffles are good."

"If you say so."  

I sink into the long silence that follows.  He breaks it abruptly.  "I lied."

"You do that a lot."  But that isn't true.  He'd lied when we were children.  He'd learned how much powerful the truth can be since then.  He rarely speaks anything but that now.

"No.  Not anymore.  But I did just now."  I don't ask – I just wait.  "He'd come home for you.  If he knew.  If you told him.  He'd come.  He wouldn't for me – but he would for you.  If you needed him."

I laugh.  "Harry will always come when he's needed.  It's what he is."  And it's true.  I knew that.  I hadn't thought Malfoy did, though.  Perhaps I don't give him enough credit.  "What makes you think I want that?"

"I don't.  I just . . . you should know that.  You love him, don't you?"

Did I?  Yes.  I love him and Ron still – they are parts of me, parts I'd lost.  But not as I once had.  "Not the way you do."

"You used to?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

I smile.  "Because I was supposed to.  It was the way it was supposed to be, and for all my independence, I was a girl in love with fairy tales and cheap movies.  Harry was the hero, I was the friend he'd turn to in the end – Ron would be there for both of us.  Only it didn't work that way.  It never does.  Did you ever sleep with him?"

He blinks at the abrupt change in subject.  "Once.  After the final battle, when it was cold and he was bruised and bleeding.  He called me Hermione and said he was sorry when it was done – sorry for doing it at all, not for calling me you.  I doubt the prat even realized that part."  

"Probably not."

"He loves you."

I laugh at that, hating the sound of my own voice.  "Maybe.  But Harry always wanted to do what he was supposed to as well.  Fairy tale endings are seductive, after all."  

I stand and head toward my room.  He stops me after a few steps.  "Where will you go?"

"I don't know.  Maybe the States.  I could do with a California summer, I think."  

"Will you . . . see him?"

I don't answer, only turn away.  It's another voice – one I'd almost forgotten – that speaks.  It's rough with disuse and pain; the silent twin whose voice and heart was buried with his brother.  "It's not your fault.  Fred – he knew . . . . We all knew.  And I would have done the same thing."

I look at George for a long moment and then I smile.  "It's alright George.  I don't believe it either."

He starts to protest and then looks down again, going silent and withdrawn.  Draco leans back insolently in his chair, napkin pressed to his nose, gray eyes following me.  "Granger?"

I turn to face him, study him as he sits debating what he's about to say.  He doesn't wear insecurity well.  It is ill-fitting and unaccustomed.  "Yes?"

"You would have been the same in Slytherin.  You would have studied, and you might not have known Potter the same way, but you wouldn't have missed what was going on, and you'd have wanted to help.  You'd have gone in on your own.  None of us would have spoken to you, and you'd be mad at us when we cheated at Quiddich.  In the end, you'd have known us better, and you'd still have fought against us.  I'd still have changed sides, and Pansy still wouldn't have.  And if you hadn't killed her, someone else would have."  

He smiles slowly.  "There were a lot of people in the Order, and not all of them were heroes.  If one of us had seen her first, she'd never have made it to Harry, even if you hadn't taken care of it yourself.  There have to be heroes, but there has to be the other kind too.  The kind who do what needs to be done.  Without them, the world wouldn't be saved.  The right side might be more right, and the line between good and bad might be colored in darker.  But it wouldn't matter, because the wars would be lost."  He kicked out of his chair and turned and left with a strange abruptness, leaving me alone in a messy kitchen with only an empty red-haired boy who used to be half of a whole.  

I whisper goodbye, not sure who I am speaking to.  Maybe myself.  And then I go upstairs to pack.


	2. Go the Spoils

Title: Go the Spoils  
Author: Sullen Siren (adena(at)direcway(dot)com)  
Summary: When the war is over, its survivors learn to live with the people they've become. Sequel to "To the Victors". Harry goes to find Hermione.  
Rating: R/NC-17  
Disclaimer: Harry Potter and all of his crazy friends do not belong to me. They belong to Warner Brothers, J.K. Rowling, and various other powerful entities that have made themselves rich off of his little scar. Please don't sue. I have nothing worthwhile to pay with anyway.  
Feedback: It makes me smile.  
Note: A sequel of sorts to "To the Victors", written simply because I had the urge to see where the Hermione from that story went. You don't NEED to read that one to read this, since the situation is evident within this story as much as it was in the last, but it has more context when read with its precursor. Dedicated to tygress, because I probably would never have finished this one if she hadn't dug the first one so much.

**Go the Spoils**

"I watched you fall.

I think I pushed.

Maybe I'm crazy,

maybe diminished.

Maybe I'm innocent.

Maybe I'm finished."

-- REM, "Diminished"

There is a hotel in France where a rock star died that he had never slept in. He'd never seen the Rolling Stones play, and looked to see if there were strings holding Keith Richards up. He'd never told a girl he loved her, and meant it. There was a church somewhere in Mexico where Jesus bled for his people, and Mary wept for their sins – he had never prayed there. He'd never tried to believe in God and failed. He'd never seen a sun set in New Orleans. He'd never drunk a whole six pack and called his ex at two am. He'd never told her he was sorry; he'd never asked her for forgiveness. He'd never tried to be redeemed. He'd never had a dog. He'd never seen an opera. He'd never tasted tequila. He'd never been sailing. He'd never told them he hated what they made him become. He'd never told them he was grateful for what he'd been forced to be.

The big thoughts, the big ideas, and the big reasons – they stopped working when he was fifteen and watching his last tie to his parents disappear. His heart had stopped acknowledging them when he saw the way Lupin's eyes turned away for a moment whenever they settled on him. They didn't blame him, they'd always said. They didn't have to. He blamed himself. And in that moment, before Lupin could look at him, Remus had too. It was enough to know the truth. He'd loved Lupin for that, in a way. It was more honesty than most ever gave him.

Friends, family, war, right, justice, revenge – they stop meaning anything, when the blood beings to flow freely enough. In the beginning, those reasons had pushed him to keep going. Eventually they weighed him down. He got out of bed because he put them aside. Because he remembered that he'd never lived in a seedy flat in London, that he'd never eaten a hot dog from a New York stand, that he'd never slept with someone and not called them the next day, that he'd never fallen off of a rented horse.

He kept going for the little things. For the moments. He kept going for the things he could do when it was over, and he wasn't the Famous Harry Potter. When he was just a boy. When he was just a man. When he was just alive, and not a hero.

And now he is. They'd cheered him in the pubs and held gaudy parades in muggle streets for him in America – but they forgotten so quickly. And they didn't know. They didn't see how close it had been, how it changed both sides. Even now, even when it was over, he carried secrets. He carried the truth of what it had cost them. Only these, he didn't carry alone.

He'd long ago stopped wondering why that wasn't a comfort to him.

They'd wanted him to stay, but he couldn't. He left so that he could heal, but he found the only way he could stay whole – or nearly so – was to keep moving, keep away from the embracing arms and loving looks. He hated the gratitude they offered without thinking – if he'd been what Dumbledore had hoped he'd be, the price would never have been so high.

Every night he dreamed of George's face. Fred's face had been tranquil in death – George's had been just as lifeless, but so much more horrible. He wandered and he did the things he'd told himself he had to live for, but he no longer wanted any of them. He didn't want anything. And on the nights when he couldn't sleep at all, it was that lack of desire that he felt the most. It was emptiness, a lack of anything. He didn't even really think he wanted it to go away. Harry didn't want anything anymore.

He called late at night, so that they weren't awake to pass the phone about, or to think of good questions. That ploy would never have worked on Hermione, but she rarely asked much. Sometimes, he thought she might understand more than any other – but he doubted it. She was Hermione, and she'd never given up on anything in her life. She wouldn't be able to understand wanting to give up on a whole life.

And he supposed that's what he wanted to do. He wasn't sure if he wanted to be no one forever, but it was what he wanted now. He wanted to walk streets without memory, and buy train tickets from men who didn't know his name, and didn't care for the scar across his head.

He hadn't thought it was in him to worry about anything anymore. He was wrong. The first night he called and no one answered, he assumed that Hermione wasn't home. The others never woke to answer the phone, so it was always her he spoke to. Every little noise had always woken Hermione up.

The second time no one answered, he thought it was odd, and he thought to call again the next night. But he forgot, or decided against it – he couldn't remember which. A month passed and he called again. No one answered. He called the next night and it rang over and over until he finally hung it up.

It was noon in England when he called, much later where he was. The voice that answered the phone sounded thin and foreign over the phone lines. "Malfoy?"

"No. This is the cleaning lady, Esmerelda. I have Malfoy tied to his bed upstairs. I only came down to fetch some honey and wax candles; can I help you, miss?"

Harry gritted his teeth. It was amazing how Draco still managed to annoy him; after all he'd gone through. "Malfoy, what's going on? Since when do you answer the phone? I thought you didn't believe in muggle devices?"

"The Weasels went to work, and I stayed home and did not, because Malfoys don't work. You have been gone far too long to have kept properly abreast of what I will and will not do. And the enchantment on the damned ceiling fan in the living room isn't working properly, and it is making this humming sound that's driving me mad."

It wasn't that far out of his way, really, was the uncharitable thought Harry managed to suppress. "It's not enchanted, it's electric."

"It's insufferable."

Harry sighed and a long paused stretched thin and awkward between them. Harry knew he likely owed Malfoy a long overdue apology. But he was Malfoy, and Harry couldn't make the words come out. "Where's Hermione?"

When Draco answered, it was in an oddly cautious tone that Harry couldn't remember him using before. "She left."

"To go where?"

"No one knows. The Weasels think it's to find you – the ones that speak anyway."

Harry felt like the center of the world was suddenly shifting, and his balance was lost as he teetered, ready to fall. "She – she's just gone?"

"Packed her bags and left. Left a note for them."

Harry shook his head slowly. "But not for you."

"We said our goodbyes."

"I'll find her."

"She doesn't want to be found Potter. She – hello? Are you there?" Draco's voice was small and distant; coming from the dropped phone as Harry closed his eyes and remembered the house they'd all shared.

The apparation felt unnatural, it'd been so long since he'd done it. But it worked. When he opened his eyes he was standing in the kitchen beside a dumbfounded Malfoy who still held a dead phone to his ear. The kitchen had changed since he'd left – modern conveniences added. (Likely at Hermione's insistence, she'd never mastered wizard cooking or household tasks.) It still smelled slightly of the mildewed walls, and Pig sat on a small perch near the kitchen window, hooting happily at the sight of Harry.

He spared a last look around, blocking away the conversations that threatened to bob up in his mind and swath him in memory. "Malfoy? Where is she?"

"Hello to you too, be-spectacled git. Gone for HOW long and you pop back in here without a hello and then-"

"Hello."

Harry sighed inwardly as Malfoy glared, sharp nose twitching in irritation.

Even after Malfoy had changed his colors, it had always been a source of comfort to Harry that the blond boy's nose twitched like a ferret when he was stressed about anything. He searched for something to say. "How . . . are you?"

"I'm living with red-heads, in a rundown shack in London. The Ministry still refuses to unfreeze my accounts, so I have to exist on a paltry living expense allowance, and haven't been allowed back to my ancestral home. The house elves have probably starved to death by now, along with the owls in our owlrey and the hell hounds we had as guards – though they might have eaten the house elves, I suppose. I live in squalor and poverty and yesterday Ronald Weasley called me Mate. I'm PEACHY. How about you?"

Harry rubbed at his eyes tiredly. "I'm fine." He looked at the blond boy. Draco looked older, he realized. He'd always seen Lucius when he looked at Draco, but now he saw more of his mother in the young man. "Where is she, Malfoy?"

Draco sank into one of the kitchen chairs with a grace that Harry was positive came with the bloodlines. There was elegance to him. THAT was his father, Lucius had it as well. Or he had, before he died bleeding and hissing hexes. Harry wondered, with a wry sort of bitterness, if the elegance came from inbreeding. "I don't know, really."

"Yes you do." Harry could tell that Draco knew more than he was willing to say. He knew that Malfoy would tell him, eventually, too, though he didn't know why he knew that.

Draco drummed long fingers on the cracked and battered ceramic top of the table. Harry could see the moment when he gave up and just answered. "California." He lifted his wand and accio'd an envelope. "She wrote a few weeks ago, asking me to send her a few things. Books mostly. This is the address."

Harry took it, trying for a moment to imagine Hermione in a sea of tanned, blonde Americans. "Thank you."

"Potter?" Draco waited till Harry looked fully at him before speaking. "Don't go. Leave her alone."

"Why?"

"Because it's what she wants. Because you won't like what you find."

Harry felt an odd thing, a small ribbon of worry threading through his conscience. He savored it. It had been so long since he'd worried for anything. "I have to go."

Draco nodded, threads of artfully placed pale hair falling in front of gray eyes until he swept them aside with a theatric gesture. "Fine."

Harry stood, awkward and unsure. He wanted to vanish again, but he felt as if he should say something. He remembered once, during the war, when he'd been drunk and afraid and Draco had been willing and warm, and Hermione had been far away, drowned in tactics and attack plans. "Malfoy, I'm--

He looked up, fury flashing across his sharp features, nose twitching. "Don't dare tell me you're fucking sorry, Potter."

Harry shrugged. "Alright. I'll see you then, Malfoy."

"Get the hell out." Harry turned, tucking the envelope into his pocket, planning how he would get there when Draco spoke again, his voice oddly quiet. "Will you be back, after? Will you be . . . home?"

Harry shuddered inwardly at the idea. The thought of coming back, of sitting at dinner with Ron and George and Ginny, of late night talks with Lupin, of coffee and waffles with Malfoy – the thought of living a real life was repugnant. He smiled instead – the hero's smile, the one he'd trained himself to give when he felt like he'd never smile again. "I'll be back soon." It was what he'd said when he first left, what he always said on the rare occasions he spoke to someone other than Hermione.

Draco stared at him, gray eyes flat and distant. "Right. See you then, Potter."

Harry walked out of the house, letting the door shut silently behind him as Draco sat silently at the table, straight-spine slipping over into a boneless slouch.

He found her at a beach in California, three miles from the posh hotel she'd given as her address. He'd been surprised at the opulence of the place. He'd somehow expected something elegant and vaguely old fashioned. Something more like Hermione. Instead it was gleaming and modern and high tech. It felt cold and empty – he found it oddly appealing.

She lay on a thread-bare lounge chair away from the dwindling crowds. It was the dying end of the evening and the sun was fading into a pale yellow-gold color he'd never quite seen on an English horizon. She made no move to leave. He didn't think she'd been here long. He wondered if she did this often – came to sit on an empty beach as night fell.

She knew he was there. He could tell from the way her shoulders curved, the way she cocked her head to the side, and the set of her spine. But she said nothing; instead she stared out over the ocean as the sun sank into it. He followed her gaze, half expecting the waves to hiss and steam as the fiery orb extinguished within its waves. "I hate that this is how it ends." She told him quietly, and he knew that she only spoke because the silence had grown too heavy to bear. She turned finally, smiling faintly. "Hello, Harry."

He settled beside her as she looked away again. Her long thighs were still pale beneath the modest blue swimsuit she wore. He wondered if that was the English in them. He'd been on the beaches of Greece for three months last year, and his skin never tanned, only burned and peeled and then showed white again. "How did you want it to end?" He smiled, and it FELT sharp and bitter, and he wondered when the last time he'd really smiled was. "We're too old to believe in fairy tale endings after all."

She twisted to look at him, the fading sunlight casting shadows over her, so that she was all half-shapes and angles and big bruised eyes he was sure had long since forgotten how to really sleep. "That's not true."

He looked away. "What's not true?"

He saw the smile from the corner of his eyes – sharp and bitter and filled with a thousand things she would never say out loud. He hated the smile more when she wore it then when he did. "I believe in happy endings. I believe in love that lasts forever, and that sometimes the prince finds the glass slipper, slips it on the princess' tiny foot, and they live happily ever after in a palace by the sea, raising dozens of tiny aristocrats. I believe in a world where magic doesn't just come from wands and Dark Wizards."

She turned away from him, watching the setting sun without blinking. "I believe in all of that. That's what makes knowing that we'll never see any of it so much harder."

She leaned back, head against the rickety back of the lawn chair she lounged in. "Harry Potter sits on a beach in California, waiting for it to get dark. Poetic, no? Like a scene in an art house movie, where the tasteful lighting tells us the state of the beleaguered hero's soul."

"I'm only out here because you're here. I was worried. You weren't home . . ." It was an odd thing to realize, that he'd left them all behind because he'd known they wouldn't understand, but she had. He'd underestimated her, for the thousandth time since the day they'd met, probably. Or maybe he'd overestimated her. Overestimated her strength, believing it would keep her whole the way his hadn't been able to do.

He still thought she was stronger than him, though.

"Were you?" She looked at him and she smiled again. "It was alright to be nothing when you could pretend the rest of us would recover, wasn't it? When you were the only one broken? But now you've been back, and suddenly you remember that there are ghosts in other people's eyes too."

"Hermione . . ." He hated how familiar it was to look at her. How like a mirror her eyes were. "I'm sorry I left." He said finally, unsure of what he could say to her, when no one had ever found the right thing to say to him.

"Sorry?" She looked at him and then laughed. "Oh Harry, it had nothing to do with you. I'm not your fault. I wasn't a soul you were supposed to save. I wasn't part of your destiny." She smiled and there was neither humor nor kindness in it. Just the fondness of a woman for a boy she'd once known. "It isn't about you anymore Harry. My world doesn't hinge on you. And the rest of the world doesn't hang from your scar either. Not anymore. You're not sorry you left. And neither am I."

He felt a burning pressure behind his chest, pushing its way out. He quelled it, fought it, subdued it, as he'd done so many times. "So what then? Life on a beach for you? Dozens of men lined up to hold your hand while you sit on the sand in the dark?"

The sun was almost gone now, and the neon lights of the concession stands sent sick pink light over the golden sands. The light licked at the fuzzy halo of her hair, cast strange shadows across it.

She looked old, and he wondered if he did as well.

"The beach for a bit. Maybe I'll go to school. Or to Paris for a while. Maybe I'll stay in the Muggle world, maybe I'll help rebuild the Ministry again."

"You're not going to . . . leave for good?"

"I'm not you. I can't walk away forever. And I don't really want to."

"Hermione . . . what do you want?"

She turned over to lie on her side, hand trailing through the sand, brown eyes staring at him with the same unblinking consideration she'd given the sun. "What do YOU want?"

"I don't know." That wasn't true. "I want to WANT again. To not feel as if everything is distant. I want to not feel alone, even when I'm with people I've known for years."

She pillowed her head on her arm, hair falling over one eye. Her suit had ridden up her thighs, showing the curve of her buttocks, a hint of dark fuzz between her legs. She made no move to cover it. "I want to see places I haven't seen. I want to build something worth building. I want to be a mother, maybe. I want to live. I just have to see if I can remember how. I want to forget the last few years, and the way I've felt since the war. I want to sleep without seeing dead faces. I want to eat escargot because Ron always said he never would, and I have some childish need to prove that I'm more sophisticated than he'll ever be." She smiled faintly. "I want to go to Disneyland, just to say I've been there, and that I hated it. I want to be in love and not have it be a lie I tell myself because I don't want to die alone."

He didn't want any of that. Harry didn't want anything, or so he'd though. But sitting here with Hermione – who was broken and battered, but trying to heal – he wanted to stay with her. Because maybe if she could heal herself, she could heal him too. "I could go with you. Sit on the Teacups, try not to throw up. We could be together." He added the last hesitantly, searching the shadowed planes of her face.

She smiled, reached out with her slim fingers to run her hand along his face. He remembered long ago, when that hand had run along the skin of his back, over his cock. When he'd held both of her hands in one of his, the other over her mouth to smother the soft cries she gave as she came. "No."

She pulled her hand away and stood, pulling a long shirt over her bathing suit, picking up her bag. He saw that the bag held five books of varying thicknesses, not one of them looking remotely like "light reading". He wondered why the familiarity didn't comfort him.

The last bits of the sun lit her silhouette as she turned back to face him. She looked unreal, a half-thing made of shadows and sighs. "I want to forget the dead faces, Harry. And yours is the one I see more than any other. I'm sorry, but I want a life without you." She looked sad, regretful – but honest. "I don't want you anymore. And I can't fix you. My life is mine now. Your life is yours."

"I don't have one." He felt himself whisper, the emptiness settling back over him like a familiar noose.

"I know. But I won't let my life become about you. Not anymore. Not for anyone or anything." She tilted her head to the side. "We all orbited around you, Harry. Moons around your sun. And they keep waiting for you to shine again. They always will. But I can't."

"They?"

She smiled sadly. "Ron, Ginny, Lupin – even Malfoy. They wait, and they love you, and they think that if you came back, then it would be set right again."

"Malfoy doesn't-"

"He does. It's a thin line between love and hate, as the old clichés say. And he spent so long hating you in so many ways, I'm not even sure if he can tell you when he crossed the line. I'm not even sure that he really did. He still hates you. But he orbits you. He always will. Just like Ron. And if you don't go back, they'll always be waiting." She shook her head. "I think that might be better than going back and showing them the truth. That seeing you will only make them realize that there's nothing left to want, or believe in."

He stared down at his feet as she hovered over him. "I never thought I'd see you give up on anything. Let alone give up on me."

She smiled again. "Things change. The list of things I gave up is getting longer and longer. I gave up a childhood, I gave up innocence, and I gave up the right to sleep at night without knowing that in fighting the evil, I became it.. And yes. I'm giving up on you. I'm not yours to protect anymore. And you're not mine to fix."

She stepped closer, toes digging into the sand. "I'll write."

It was a pitying gesture, and he hated it. "Don't."

"Alright." She leaned down and kissed him on the forehead. He shrank away from the touch as if it burned, but if she noticed, she gave no sign.

He watched her walk away as the light left the beach, save for the unnatural pink and green of the neon lights. "Goodbye, Hermione."


End file.
